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A pro-Israel messaging website badged with the name of a thinktank that does not exist has published more than half a million words in nine days, built on a commercial platform that promises to optimize content so that AI chatbots will cite it.

The site gives Israel’s position on subjects including the torture of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli war crimes and whether Israel has deliberately starved Palestinians in Gaza, all presented as neutral research.

The New York media production company Piro Inc filed the site with the US justice department this month under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara), a 1938 law that requires anyone working for a foreign government to formally disclose it, as material it distributes for the Israeli government.

The site publishes in the name of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, which apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports. Its own terms of use are governed by the laws of “the state in which the Institute is established”, which they decline to name.

The existence of the site was first reported on 14 August. Since then the institute has added a page headed funding, which states: “An earlier version of this page said the Institute operated without external funding, and that was true when it was written.”

The site is one part of a broader effort, financed by tens of millions of dollars from the Israeli government and routed through third parties including the European advertising group Havas Media, to prime chatbots to make Israel’s arguments for it. A contract between Havas and another American firm working on the campaign commits it to the “deployment of websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations”.

The Guardian contacted Piro Inc, Havas Media and the Israeli government advertising agency LaPam for comment. Comment was also sought via a contact email address published on the Hanover Institute website.

It comes at a point when Israel’s standing in US public opinion has collapsed, and when Israeli officials have begun briefing media outlets that money spent on so-called “Hasbara” efforts at public diplomacy overseas has been wasted.

The site

According to a Guardian analysis, between 6 and 14 August the Hanover Institute published 124 reports totaling more than 560,000 words, an average of about 4,500 words each. On 12 and 13 August alone it produced 73 reports, amounting to almost 354,000 words in two days. Nothing has been published since the first reports about the Hanover Institute.

All but one of the 124 headlines on the website opens with a question resembling one that a user might type into a chatbot, including “Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism?”, “Did Israel Expel Palestinians From Their Land?”, “Is Israel Carrying Out a Genocide in Gaza?”

The reports are presented in a quasi-academic manner and are punctiliously sourced, with citations including the World Bank, UN agencies, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Amnesty International and the text of the Genocide Convention.

Nick Cleveland-Stout, a research associate at the Quincy Institute who has reported on the site, told the Guardian that his first impression was of something impressive. “It succeeds in masquerading as very academic – the website design, the logos, everything just looks good. But the more you read it, you’re able to realise that a lot of it makes no sense.”

For example, the information the Hanover Institute site presents is persistently framed to blunt criticism of Israel. Where human rights organisations have concluded that Israel is committing genocide or apartheid, the reports reliably observe that no court has entered a verdict on the claim – a formulation that appears in 20 of the 124 reports according to the Guardian’s count.

Casualty and aid figures are attributed to “a party to the events”, a caveat used in 55 reports and applied to Israel’s own counts as readily as to Palestinian ones. The reader is left with the impression that little about Gaza can be established.

One study – a 2022 analysis of antisemitic comments on the Facebook pages of British, French and German media outlets – is cited 454 times across 88 of the 124 reports, including in pages on apparently unrelated topics including land registration in the occupied territories, Aipac’s influence on US media coverage, the Gaza death toll, the 1948 expulsions and the blockade of Gaza.

Cleveland-Stout noted the cumulative effect of this inclusion. “Almost every article concludes with saying, well, just talking about this though could contribute to antisemitism,” he said. “And it’ll throw in the study about Facebook comments in Britain.”

Building for the machines

The Guardian’s analysis found that initially the site carried a kind of file that tells AI systems what a site contains and how to read it (an llms.txt file), but which did not describe the Hanover Institute at all. It was the standard file of Res, an “AI-native content platform that helps B2B [business-to-business] teams get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini”, which sells what the industry calls generative engine optimization.

The Guardian archived the file on 13 August. It has since been replaced with a bespoke version written for machine readers, and Res is no longer named anywhere on the site.

Res’s founder, Hai Tran, registered with the US justice department on 22 July as a subcontractor to Piro on the Israeli account, giving his position as “digital strategist”. Tran told Politico that his role was disclosed in that filing.

The Guardian contacted Res for comment.

Piro’s own website advertises a service it calls AI Story Optimization, under which it will “author content engineered for how LLMs evaluate credibility”, with the work shipping “on your site or on trusted third-party properties we build”.

Cleveland-Stout said the more consequential target was not the possibility of users getting to the site with a live search, but the training data. “There’s kind of two ways to do it,” he said. The first is publishing sites and hoping chatbots cite them. The second, “the more concerning and potentially more effective thing”, is getting material into repositories such as Common Crawl that supply the underlying training data for commercial models.

“When it regurgitates narratives the chatbot is trained on, it won’t even cite the sources,” he said. “You won’t be able to fact-check it.”

The older network has already made that journey. The seven sites run by Clock Tower X – the firm run by former Trump campaign manager and digital director Brad Parscale – appeared 294 times in Common Crawl’s July index, the repository that supplies training data to commercial AI developers. The Hanover Institute does not appear yet, its reports having gone up after that crawl closed. It is at the start of the same pipeline.

Every page of the Hanover site carries a foreign-agent disclosure at its foot. Cleveland-Stout put that to Perplexity, which he said told him that users could visit the website and judge its trustworthiness for themselves. “But how many people are doing that?” he said.

The Guardian’s tests of chatbots at the time of reporting showed that scrutiny of the Hanover Institute’s output had already made a mark on chatbot content, however.

Asked for new research published by the Hanover Institute, ChatGPT’s webchatbot offered links to four reports, but also warned that the institute was subject to “significant controversy over who funds it and why it exists”, offering a gloss of and links to Quincy Institute’s reporting.

The chain

Piro is contracted for $1m across two work orders according to Fara filings, but this sum is dwarfed by the spending on the wider campaign it belongs to.

Both Piro and Clock Tower X are subcontractors to Havas Media Germany GmbH, a Frankfurt company held through Havas’s Spanish arm and ultimately by the Amsterdam-listed Havas NV.

Havas is named as the intermediary in the US foreign-agent registrations of five American firms: Clock Tower X, Piro, Targeted Communications Global, Bridges Partners and Davis Media NY. Justice department filings record it paying Clock Tower X $15m in six installments between 24 October 2025 and 3 March 2026, and Targeted Communications Global $9,892,335 between October and December 2025.

Seven days after the first of those payments, on 31 October 2025, Havas’s own US subsidiary terminated its registration as an agent of the Israeli government, according to filings. While it held that registration it was obliged to itemise what it received: its filing for the six months before 31 October 2023 records $2,951,745 from its German sister company on the Israeli account. Once the German entity began paying American contractors directly, Havas ceased to disclose anything, because a foreign principal has no filing obligation.

In effect, this meant that the broader campaign would not be immediately visible in the public record, only the piecemeal filings of individual contractors.

In Israel, procurement records show the government advertising agency LaPam awarding Havas entities contracts without competitive tender: $39m (€33.5m), $29m (€25m) and $17.5m (€15m) across 2019, and $58.3m (€50m) in March 2023 for the planning and purchase of media abroad. That contract expired on 15 March 2024. A search of LaPam’s published record to 5 August 2026, and of the tender register, found no further award to Havas – none covering the period in which Havas was paying $24.9m to American firms.

The money was not wholly confined to efforts to seed chatbots. Targeted Communications Global’s filings disclose a social media campaign called Freedom Not Terror, whose 30-second video, posted as unlisted on YouTube in October 2025, has been viewed 28.1m times. Its TikTok account has 425 followers. The campaign site carries the line “Paid for by LAPAM”. It has published nothing since December 2025.

The Guardian contacted Targeted Communications Global for comment.

The refuge of all failures

In Israel, officials have aired doubts about the campaign to sway US public opinion by gaming AI, and about public diplomacy in general. In July, Israeli officials briefed Ynet that it had failed, one saying the government “paid a lot of money, but the situation only got worse”.

A former senior figure in Israel’s public diplomacy apparatus told the same paper it was “a terrible hoax on the scale of Pollard” – a reference to Jonathan Pollard, the American analyst jailed for spying for Israel in 1987, an incident that marked a low point in the country’s relationship with Washington.

Speaking to Kan about Parscale, another official said: “He was supposed to improve the situation. We paid him a lot of money. But what did he do with it?” The foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, had allocated $181.6m (₪545m) to international public diplomacy on taking office, then a further $666.3m (₪2bn) for 2026 and 2027.

The YNet reporting said budget control had passed to the ministry’s director general, Eden Bartel, and to Eran Shayovitch, an external adviser brought in by the minister. Shayovitch is named on Piro’s foreign-agent filing as one of two Israeli officials with whom the firm engages.

US public opinion polling reveals the source of these frustrations. Gallup found in February that Americans sympathised more with Palestinians than with Israelis for the first time, with 36% siding with Israel. Pew recorded 60% of Americans holding an unfavourable view of Israel in April, up nearly 20 points since 2022, with the sharpest movement among the young. An AP-NORC survey published on 7 July found 31% of Americans say Israel’s military actions in Gaza constitute genocide, rising to 52% of Democrats, and 58% of Democrats saying the US is too supportive of Israel, against 45% in January 2024.

Cleveland-Stout doubted that any public diplomacy could overcome the opposition to Israeli policy. “There is a lack of reflection on the fact that the policies themselves are the ones that are leading to a lot of Americans questioning their support for Israel,” he said. “They view what is a political problem as a marketing one.”

He cited the late Israeli politician Yossi Sarid, who a year before his death in 2015 joked in an interview that “Hasbara is always the refuge of all failures. Everything is going great – only the hasbara is garbage. If only the hasbara was ok, then everyone would realize the ideal situation.”

Whether the campaign works on its own terms is a separate question from whether it works for Israel, though. “Parscale is having success in influencing chatbots, and the Hanover Institute is and will continue to have success at influencing the responses that chatbots give,” Cleveland-Stout said. “But they’re not changing the polls, which is what Israel actually cares about.”

His wider concern was what the experiment demonstrates. “Whether it’s foreign governments, whether it’s companies, whether it’s even just a guy who owns an ice cream shop – LLM grooming, poisoning, whatever you want to call it, is part of the new reality that we live in.”

Although neither responded to the Guardian, the Israeli foreign ministry has said the state does not conduct “influence operations” in the United States, and that it is “scrupulously careful to implement the provisions of American law”, and Piro’s co-founder Daniel Rosenberg has said the firm was retained “to put accurate, sourced facts into the public record and to counter misinformation about Israel with verifiable information”.

Hostile and violent attitudes toward women are the clearest warning sign of violent extremism, a study has found.

As national cabinet prepares to discuss how to combat family violence, the research identifies misogyny as not just a social issue, but a matter of national security.

The University of Melbourne survey of Australians as young as 13 found that misogyny could predict support for extremist violence "way beyond" where someone sat on the political spectrum, what religion they belonged to, or how much time they spent online.

Report author Sara Meger said the study was the first of its kind to show that misogyny was not an isolated prejudice, but a robust, cross-cutting predictor of violent extremism.

"The number one thing predicting whether or not somebody is going to hold extremist attitudes is whether they think violence against women is acceptable," Dr Meger said.

The research was funded by the Office of National Intelligence and put forward five recommendations, the first being that misogyny and anti-feminism should be recognised as a form of violent extremism in the national counter-extremism framework.

Teen boys most likely to hold hostile attitudes

Dr Meger's team surveyed 3,429 Australians about their attitudes toward women, gender roles, consent violence against women, and a range of extremist ideologies.

A significant minority of Australian men and boys shared beliefs that gender equality had gone too far, that feminism was a hate movement, that it was OK to pressure girlfriends into having sex, and that feminism should be resisted with violence if necessary.

Teenagers and young men were much more likely to express hostile views when compared with both young women, and with older men.

'Extraordinary' link between misogyny and extremism

The researchers also analysed associations between various types of extremist views.

The results revealed a consistent and robust pattern of positive associations between misogynistic attitudes and multiple indicators of extremist behaviour.

"If you take misogyny, violence against women attitudes and this idea that feminism's gone too far, if you combine them, they account for approximately 70 to 80 per cent of all the explained variants in how someone's answering the extremism questions," Dr Meger said.

Dr Meger's team looked at six extremist movements: incels; far-right; white supremacy; far-left; anti-feminism; and religious extremism.

Misogyny was the key ideology that cut across all of them.

"What they share is an ideology that men ought to dominate women, that transgression of the natural gender order deserves punishment and that violence in service of restoring the natural gender order is legitimate," she said.

A national security issue

Dr Meger said the findings meant intelligence agencies and police forces should take anti-feminist views into account in their work to combat violent extremism.

However, she cautioned against "securitising" misogynistic views.

"I don't think the policy solution is to try and criminalise people's beliefs and attitudes," she said. "It's more about recognising the creation of these rifts in the first place that's driving the political violence.

"And that means the solution has to be much more oriented around education and cohesion building."

The Australian Federal Police confirmed that "some individuals charged with possessing or creating violent extremist material have also had misogynistic material".

"The AFP is currently exploring how it can improve the capture of information specifically relating to gender, sexual orientation and/or identity to better inform the identification of matters arising in our work, and to support future investigations, analysis and reporting requirements," the AFP said in a statement.

The Office of National Intelligence, which funded the University of Melbourne research, did not specifically comment on the findings or whether it would take up the recommendations in its advice to government.

Lucy Nicholas, an associate professor in gender and sexuality at Western Sydney University, has completed studies on the manosphere, gendered violence and right-wing extremism.

They noted the University of Melbourne findings were in line with other research, such as their own study around misinformation.

"We found more men than women were likely to believe misinformation about gender equality, family courts and the system being against men and they were also more likely to have violence-affirming views or believe that violence can be used for a cause," Dr Nicholas said.

"We need to always realise that whilst young men might feel aggrieved, what they're aggrieved about is a loss of entitlement and privilege and that's not actually reasonable.

"We need to work with men to see that violence is not a reasonable response to the loss of that privilege and that there's other ways to manage it where they work on themselves rather than blaming."

It is about more than time spent online

Dr Meger's study also explored the level to which online environments were cultivating misogynistic and extremist attitudes.

What it found was that exposure to manfluencer content, online dating platforms and pornography were the behaviours most connected to attitudes that excused violence against women.

This was in contrast to the platforms government agencies has been focused on such as social media, gaming and online forums.

When testing if these environments drove extremism directly, they lost all predictive power.

"The online factors that the government's been really concerning themselves with, the only one that retains any independent relationship with extremism, the only online variable that still has any independent relationship with extremism, is pornography.

"And this is completely off our radar for countering violent extremism."

Dr Meger said while the research painted a picture of more hostile attitudes toward women from younger generations than might be expected, it was important to remember those views were not dominant.

"It feels dire, but some of the helpful elements that I think we can take away is that even if you just look at the tables on frequencies," she said.

"What it doesn't show is the vast majority of people responding on these attitudes questions are strongly disagreeing.

"It's a vocal minority, and they might be an influential minority that are expressing these really problematic attitudes, but most Australians don't harbour them.

"That gives me hope."